Editions: Anne Desmet ‘Olympic Metamorphoses’

The first wood engraver ever to be elected to the Royal Academy, Desmet exhibits internationally and has won over 30 awards for her work in which architectural metamophosis is a recurrent theme. Here, her latest body of eighteen exquisitely detailed editioned wood engravings concern the developing London Olympics site near her Hackney home. Concentrating on the construction of the Olympic Stadium, Velodrome and Aquatics Centre, she has created semi-abstract, map-like images, which layer together different phases of construction.

Desmet says she is drawn to the ways in which these pieces of architecture display human aspirations, and also signal the passing of an existing landscape and way of life.

Her subject matter pulls in two directions: one body of work is essentially topographical, sometimes subject to metamorphoses and rendered via the print processes of wood engraving and/or linocut; the other comprises printed collages concerned with urban myths, intuitive architectural fantasies and histories of urban destruction and regeneration